Pakistan Quake Death Toll Rises To 215
Rescue workers searched Thursday through the rubble of villages destroyed by a powerful earthquake in southwestern Pakistan that killed at least 215 people.
There was little hope of finding more survivors of the 6.4-magnitude quake, which devastated an impoverished mountain valley on Wednesday and made some 15,000 people homeless.
"Almost all the rubble had been cleared by last night," said Shaukat Ali, the home secretary of the province of Baluchistan, where the quake occurred. "We don't know if anyone is still buried in the debris."
Temperatures in the region, which neighbors Afghanistan, fell to around freezing overnight - a grim test for those forced to sleep in the open. The military said its relief teams had erected enough tents for between 8,000 and 10,000 people.
Wednesday's quake hit before sunrise, as most people slept. Witnesses reported two strong jolts about an hour apart, the second of which collapsed the flimsy mud-brick and timber houses common in the region.
The worst-hit area was the Ziarat valley, where hundreds of houses were destroyed in at least eight villages, including some buried in landslides triggered by the quake.
Dilawar Kakar, mayor of the hilltop town of Ziarat, said 170 people in the area had been killed, with 375 injured and around 15,000 left homeless. Officials raised the death toll Thursday morning to 215.
Army planes flew in tents, medical supplies and blankets to the quake zone and countries including the United States and Germany offered help.
Survivors had other concerns: mourning lost relatives and digging the mass graves in which many were being interred.
Haji Shahbaz, a man from the hard-hit village of Wam, said he had lost 17 relatives.
"Nothing is left here, and now life is worthless for me," Shahbaz said, wailing in despair, tears streaking his dust-caked face.
"I rushed toward them but the roof of my own room collapsed and the main iron support hit me," he said. "That thing broke my back and I am in severe pain, but thank God my children and relatives are safe."
Pakistan is no stranger to natural disasters, but the quake comes at a precarious time for the Muslim country, with the civilian government battling al Qaeda and Taliban attacks as well as a looming economic crisis.
At least three hard-line Islamic organizations also were quick to aid quake survivors, according to an Associated Press reporter who toured the area.
Among them was Jamaat-ud-Dawa, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government for links to Muslim separatists fighting in India's portion of the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
The group set up relief camps and won friends among survivors of a 7.6-magnitude quake that devastated Kashmir and northern Pakistan in October 2005, killing about 80,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.
Baluchistan is home to a long-running separatist movement, but has so far been spared the level of militant violence seen in the northwestern tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.
Pakistan is prone to seismic upheavals since it sits atop an area of collision between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, the same force responsible for the birth of the Himalayan mountains. Baluchistan's capital, Quetta, was devastated by a 7.5-magnitude temblor in 1935 that killed more than 30,000 people.